Avoid meeting meltdown
How to actually achieve something when teams gather
lways on, never done.
That’s the conclusion of a study conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership, which found that 60 percent of professionals, managers and executives who carry smartphones for their jobs report interacting with work a whopping 13.5 hours each workday.
Technology and the “always on” expectations of professionals enable organizations to mask poor processes, indecision, dysfunctional cultures and subpar infrastructure because they know that everyone will pick up the slack, the center concluded in its study. Can’t make a decision? Call another meeting. Have a fear-based culture? Copy several people on every e-mail so your backside is covered.
No wonder, then, that one of the biggest sources of frustration for these business leaders who are tethered to their smartphones is unnecessary or poorly planned meetings that waste their time.
In addition to putting down our cellphones now and then, we can make our meetings more efficient and useful to head off irritation. Here are five ways to make meetings more valuable in your company:
1. Only meet to create value
Meetings are for creating value, not playing politics, covering your backside or simply because “that’s how we’ve always done things.”
If the meeting doesn’t create value, cancel the meeting. You’ll reap an instant savings from the freed-up staff time, not to mention the opportunity for them to do more valuable work.
Meetings are a great place to brainstorm ideas, to reach a key decision, to gain full buy-in from your staff or to coordinate execution.
Just make sure the area you’re brainstorming on, or the decision you’re making, or the project you’re coordinating on creates enough value for your company to make it yield a healthy return on your meeting investment.
2. Plan the meeting in advance
Have a leader (or at least a facilitator) for every meeting who has actually given it serious thought. Ideally, this means a written agenda that gets in the hands of all participants well in advance of the meeting, so they can come prepared.
If there is specific information or other preparation work that participants need to have ready, make that explicit on the agenda.
Again, this isn’t just about creating a policy — which many organizations will simply ignore — but about making it a cultural must-have in your company that this is how we do meetings: We plan them in advance; we have written agendas; we come fully prepared.
3. Hold your participants accountable to start the meeting strong
This means starting the meeting on time and expecting all participants to come prepared. If Tim comes in late or unprepared, privately hold him back after the meeting to have an adult conversation: “Tim, I noticed that you came in 12 minutes late today, and that you didn’t have the Calloway numbers that we needed ready to share. Did something happen that got in the way of that? It really had an impact on the meeting and your peers.”
All of us will have times when things come up, but if Tim has a pattern of things coming up, that is something that you need to lay out as unacceptable. Frame it in terms of the impact of that behavior on the other participants and the company. Ask for his full agreement to change that behavior. This kind of immediate and direct communication, respectful and done in private after the meeting, usually will clean up Tim’s behavior.
4. Follow your meeting plan
It’s one thing to have an agenda, but altogether another thing to actually follow it.
Make sure that the person leading the meeting guides the conversation, gives all participants a voice and pushes past unproductive moments when the meeting is on the verge of going down a dead-end spur.
Of course, there are times when that tangent which Sarah brings up is brilliant, and sparks a whole new way of seeing the situation and the best course of action. Experienced leaders know when to let spontaneity and creativity have a free reign. There are times when ditching your pre-conceived agenda is the right move for the company.
5. Clarify and follow up on action items
To reap the value of the meeting, stuff has to get done. At the end of the meeting, go back and explicitly clarify action commitments out of the meeting. It might sound like this:
“Let’s recap what we agreed to do. Tim you own two action steps from today, X and Y, both of which are to be done by this Friday close of business. You agreed to mark them complete on the project board when done. Sarah, you own item Z, which is due by the 15th, and which you’ll give a summary of the outcome in your next weekly report.”
Clarifying who owns which tasks and when they are due is half the battle for accountability. The other half is ongoing follow-up to make sure all assigned tasks got done. As a default, the meeting leader should be responsible to check in with all the task holders.
As the leader in your company, you must model the behavior you want others to emulate. A culture of accountability is built in great part by leaders consistently doing the behaviors they want their teams to absorb.